If truth is stranger than fiction, as we sometimes say, it may be that we live in a state of estrangement from the truth. Suppose it were all turned around and the fictions by which we lice were suddenly and starkly thrust, as on the Damascus road, into the light of a Truth so splendid we would cringe and hide our wounded eyes from it. Suppose we can only bear one glimpse of the Truth at a time. Then the Truth would be wonderful and terrible, and we would cherish our moments before it and long for more—yet we would be afraid lest we get too much all at once. . But suppose further that the Truth took on the nature of our fictions making—incredible!—our fictions bearers of the Truth. Who could conceive such a thing, even in retrospect? Perhaps only those who have once been partially blinded by the Truth—whether suddenly or gradually—come to the breath-taking realization that the One who sits at table and breaks bread and drinks wine with us is the One through whom and for whom all ten billion light years of creation, including our own come-lately, here and now existence, have their being. To sit at table with Him is more wonderful and terrible than a blinding light since it allows us no fictional existence in which to shroud ourselves, no place to hide from the relentlessly gracious claim that our very existence, fractured and fictionalized as it is, is of infinite worth, potentially a bearer of the very Truth which we fear could so easily crush us under the weight of it’s glory. . But suppose, finally, that this awesome condition in which we may find ourselves has in it a kind of comprehensive intelligibility we had not dared to consider before, a reason about reason, a supra rationem, that is so inclusive of us and the universe that we couldn’t see it unless it were shown to us in a gigantic mirror. If even cosmic chaos has in its hidden order, as we are surprisingly coming to understand, how much more astonishing and compelling is that greater intelligibility which unites all creation—even the turbulence and unpredictable upheavals of natural and human existence—to its creator. Such a union would have to be full God and fully human. Yet this remains ancient text and obscure doctrine until, in that breathless moment, we see ourselves, the full dimensions of our existence, reflected in the Holy One at the table with us. In the broken bread and wine, He becomes a mirror in whom we see simultaneously the embodied chaos of human existence in a vast and meaningless universe, and the hidden order and sacred destiny which He by His Presence—and not separable from that Presence—in a moment of epiclesis would beget in us. Then—though we could never say how—we see that the fragment could contain the whole, we are captivated by the intelligibility of His nature which we long to embrace, and it draws us to the edge of the abyss of uncreated light, the inner life of God. . But alas—to lay hold on that remarkable intelligibility by which one’s fragmentary existence becomes the bearer of the whole, that intelligibility through which all things have been made---to lay hold on that by faith is to touch the ark of the covenant, it is to hear “the sound of a mighty wind,” as “the roar of the New Jerusalem”,” and it is to die. Who wants to die so that the uncreated light and life of God may indwell human flesh and turn everything we do into the work of God’s Spirit? . Holy in its nature, the life of the Spirit is stunning in its impact; the depths of its mysterious centered silence remains unmoved, intensely personal, even in its rush through the walls of the upper room, its pause to console, its power to disclose and to heal, and its provocation to joy and exuberant praise. This is marvelous and dangerous; ordinary human flesh should not have to consider such alternatives. . If we do die, then all that we saw in Him and in ourselves because of Him as He sat at table with us, now becomes in our death the transformation of ordinary existence. We become in our individual and common life the outer expression of His invisible nature, including the darkness of dereliction as well as the light or the transfiguration—that by which condemnation is condemned, false light is itself falsified, and daily life is a continuing intra-mundane ecstasy. Who will die to bear witness to the inner life of God, to become an expression of this higher order? Not many—or perhaps, in another way, somewhere inside, all of us know we are supposed to die. In moments of deeply centered reflection we know the death instinct is not biological but teleological—we have been given life so as to die for what is so much more important than our own lives. If we just knew a bit more—if we could just put our hand and touch it, to be sure we are not being deceived…” James E. Loder, The Transforming Moment, pp. 211-213
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 14:39:02 +0000